Click here to send us a topic idea or question for Weekend Wisdom.

Question: My niece has been living with her paternal grandparents for two years. She is now four and they have decided that it is getting too hard for them. We’ve agreed to take her in. She knows us, but we haven’t spent much time with her. What’s the best way to move her to our home that will cause the least psychological damage to her. She is very attached to her grandparents.

Resources:

• Kinship Parenting Resources
• Transitioning a Child to Your Home
• Creating and Cultivating Attachment

Support the show

Please leave us a rating or review. This podcast is produced by www.CreatingaFamily.org. We are a national non-profit with the mission to strengthen and inspire adoptive, foster & kinship parents and the professionals who support them.

Creating a Family brings you the following trauma-informed, expert-based content:

• Weekly podcasts
• Weekly articles/blog posts
• Resource pages on all aspects of family building

Click here to send us a topic idea or question for Weekend Wisdom.

Join us to talk about how kids understand adoption and how best to talk with them about adoption. Our guest is Camillia Whitehead, is a MSW and a licensed clinical social worker, and the Founder of Wise Care Consulting, LLC.

In this episode, we cover:

• How does a child’s understanding of adoption differ by age?
  • Toddlers & Preschoolers
  • School Age
  • Tweens/Teens
  • Young Adults
• How does openness or lack of openness impact a child’s understanding of adoption?
• How does transracial adoption impact a child’s understanding of adoption?
• How to talk about adoption at different ages?
  • What are the important points you want to make sure your child understands at each stage?
• What are some common questions children ask at different developmental stages?
  • Why didn’t my birth parents parent me?
  • Can I go back to my birth parents?
  • Do my birth parents think about me?
  • Did my birth parents love me?
  • Who do I look like?
  • Why did they parent my sibling?
  • How am I like my birth parents, and how am I different.”
• Why not wait for your child to ask questions and then talk with them?
• What if your child shows little or no interest in their adoption story?
• What to say when you know very little about the birth parents?
• How can you talk about adoption and the role of the birth father with young children who do not understand the concept of sex?
• How to handle the “You’re not my real mom or dad” statement?
• How to handle hard birth parent stories? 
• What to do when your cultural or ethnic background is strongly prejudiced against adoption? 
  • Don’t outright lie. 
  • Think through carefully what you are afraid of by telling the child.
    • That the child will be rejected by extended family?
    • That you will be judged or rejected by extended family?
    • That the child will share the information to others in your community?
  • Accept that the odds are extremely high that the child is going to find out from over-the-counter DNA testing or someone in the family will tell or from 8th grade biology assignment. 
  • Accept that at some point the failure to tell is the same as lying. When adult adoptees who were not told by their parents were interviewed later in life they almost universally say that it was the lie that hurt the most and did the most damage to their relationship with their parents.
  • Start laying the groundwork at an early age.
    • Families are formed in different ways.
    • All types of families are good.
    • We had trouble having kids and we were so happy when you arrived.
    • Try to establish connections with other adoptive parents
    • Point out adoptive families when you see them in real life or TV or movies
  • Review your reasons for not wanting to tell and decide on an age that you will tell.
  • Explain their adoption story. 

Support the show

Please leave us a rating or review. This podcast is produced by www.CreatingaFamily.org. We are a national non-profit with the mission to strengthen and inspire adoptive, foster & kinship parents and the professionals who support them.

Creating a Family brings you the following trauma-informed, expert-based content:

• Weekly podcasts
• Weekly articles/blog posts
• Resource pages on all aspects of family building

Click here to send us a topic idea or question for Weekend Wisdom.

Question: Do you have any suggestions for articles or posts on telling a sibling that their new baby sibling is third-party conceived (e.g. donor egg)? We haven't told our 5-year-old son that we are pregnant yet, and I'm wondering if it is appropriate to tell him we used donor eggs at the same time we drop the big news that he will be a big brother. He will already have questions about conception. Too much info all at once? 

• Suggested Books on Adoption
  • Books for Children Conceived Through Embryo Donation
• More information on Embryo Donation/Embryo Adoption

Support the show

Please leave us a rating or review. This podcast is produced by www.CreatingaFamily.org. We are a national non-profit with the mission to strengthen and inspire adoptive, foster & kinship parents and the professionals who support them.

Creating a Family brings you the following trauma-informed, expert-based content:

• Weekly podcasts
• Weekly articles/blog posts
• Resource pages on all aspects of family building

Click here to send us a topic idea or question for Weekend Wisdom.

Teens and sex are a scary topic for lots of parents. How can we impact our kids' decisions and what do we say? Join our conversation today with Dr. Debby Herbenick, a Provost Professor at the Indiana University School of Public Health-Bloomington, where she leads the National Survey of Sexual Health and Behavior. She is the author of Yes Your Kid: What Parents Need to Know About Today’s Teens and Sex.

In this episode, we cover:

• What do you believe a parent's role should be in sex education?
• How do you become an askable parent?
• How to talk with our kids about sex without sounding overly judgmental but also convey your values.
• 5 minutes a week conversations.
• The importance of having high-quality books on puberty and sexuality around the house.
• When to start talking about sex with kids?
• How to talk with young people about consent
• Impact of technology (internet, social media, ubiquitous cell phones, etc.) on sexual development.
• What are reasonable parental rules surrounding technology usage?
• Taking and sharing sexual images--how common?
  • How should parents even start talking with their child about nude images?
  • At what age should we start this conversation
  • How to share the downside
• Pornography or sexually explicit media
  • How common do kids access porn, and at what ages?
  • Is viewing porn bad for kids?
  • At what age should parents start talking with kids about pornography?
  • What should parents say about porn?
  • How to keep our kids from viewing porn?
  • How to respond if we catch our kid watching porn or know that they have viewed it?
• Having these discussions when we haven’t had a lifetime of raising this child?

Support the show

Please leave us a rating or review. This podcast is produced by www.CreatingaFamily.org. We are a national non-profit with the mission to strengthen and inspire adoptive, foster & kinship parents and the professionals who support them.

Creating a Family brings you the following trauma-informed, expert-based content:

• Weekly podcasts
• Weekly articles/blog posts
• Resource pages on all aspects of family building

Click here to send us a topic idea or question for Weekend Wisdom.

Question: We are seriously considering becoming foster parents.  We have 2 children by birth, and I am really worried about how this will affect them and what I can do to prevent some of the negative effects.

Resources:

• The Impact of Fostering and Adoption on Kids Already in the Family (Resource)
• Talking with your Resident Kids about Foster Care or Kinship Care (Resource)

Support the show

Please leave us a rating or review. This podcast is produced by www.CreatingaFamily.org. We are a national non-profit with the mission to strengthen and inspire adoptive, foster & kinship parents and the professionals who support them.

Creating a Family brings you the following trauma-informed, expert-based content:

• Weekly podcasts
• Weekly articles/blog posts
• Resource pages on all aspects of family building

Click here to send us a topic idea or question for Weekend Wisdom.

Are you often bewildered by your child's behavior? Check out this interview with Dafna Lender, a LCSW and a certified trainer and supervisor/consultant in both Theraplay and Dyadic Developmental Psychotherapy. She is also an EMDR therapist. She is the author of “Theraplay® – The Practitioner’s Guide” and “Integrative Attachment Family Therapy: A Clinical Guide to Heal and Strengthen the Parent-Child Relationship.”

In this episode, we cover:

Impact of Trauma

• What is trauma? 
• Trauma vs PTSD vs. Development Trauma Disorder
• Neglect
• How does trauma impact the brain?
• How does this impact affect the child?
• Does the age of the child, when they experienced trauma, or the type of trauma affect the degree to which the child will be impacted?
• Impact of preverbal trauma- before the child has language and memory.
• If a child is able to leave the abusive situation, can it lower the impact of trauma or PTSD?
• Attachment trauma. 

How to Best Parent a Child Who Has Experienced Trauma

• What is a typical behavior for a child who has experienced trauma?
• Internal working model formed with earliest caregivers that forms a template for future relationships with caregivers.
• The children often “reject you before you can reject them.” 
• Importance of awareness of one’s own vulnerabilities and insecurities that may be triggered by caring for children with a history of trauma.
• How to help our kids heal and attach? Tips and Techniques.

How to Discipline a Child Who Has Experienced Trauma 

• See behavior as developmental, not moral.
• Don’t spin into the future by predicting the worst. Deal with your fears.
• Recognize that ultimately, you can’t control your child. Understand what you can control, and you can only control yourself.
• Provide a balance of structure and nurture.
• Time-out?

Support the show

Please leave us a rating or review. This podcast is produced by www.CreatingaFamily.org. We are a national non-profit with the mission to strengthen and inspire adoptive, foster & kinship parents and the professionals who support them.

Creating a Family brings you the following trauma-informed, expert-based content:

• Weekly podcasts
• Weekly articles/blog posts
• Resource pages on all aspects of family building

Click here to send us a topic idea or question for Weekend Wisdom.

Question: I wanted to bring up something about your article on the risks for an expectant mom changing her mind. You have a point that says any placement before five months into the pregnancy is a risk. We recently had a match with a woman who was only four months along. We asked about this, and our agency tells us that there is no correlation between the time of the match and disruption. What is the truth?

Resources:

• Understanding the Birth Parent's Experience (Resource)
• Evaluating Risk Factors in Adoption (Resource)
• Choosing an Adoption Agency (Resource)

Support the show

Please leave us a rating or review. This podcast is produced by www.CreatingaFamily.org. We are a national non-profit with the mission to strengthen and inspire adoptive, foster & kinship parents and the professionals who support them.

Creating a Family brings you the following trauma-informed, expert-based content:

• Weekly podcasts
• Weekly articles/blog posts
• Resource pages on all aspects of family building

Click here to send us a topic idea or question for Weekend Wisdom.

One of the hardest parts of being a kinship caregiver is navigating the relationship with the child’s birth parent. We talk with Dr. Joseph Crumbley, a social worker, family therapist, and author of “An Overview of Kinship Care.”

In this episode, we cover:

• Creating a Family listening sessions with kinship caregivers in rural counties.
• What are some of the complicating factors in the relationship between kinship caregivers and the child’s parents?
• Grandparents and other caregivers sometimes feel that the child’s parents will threaten them with taking the child away if they do something that the parent disapproves of.
• How to not enable the child’s parent but still have a relationship.
• How to set healthy boundaries for the caregiver’s and child’s best interest when you have years of experience not setting healthy boundaries?
• How to handle others in the family who interfere with the boundaries you’ve established?
• I don’t know if this is a question, but I really struggle with getting my kids opportunities to see their mom and siblings. All other siblings have been reunited, and I gather it’s painful for their mom to see the two that were adopted by us (she surrendered her rights). Although we live relatively close to them, we have only managed 2-3 visits a year, mostly because of long periods of no responses to my texts or last-minute cancellations of planned visits. Sometimes our adopted kids can’t even remember their siblings’ names and it just breaks my heart. I’d love for them to have a closer relationship, but I have only limited control.
• How to handle the anger, shame, guilt you feel at the child’s parents?
• How to support co-parenting when the child’s parent is still not in a healthy place?
• How to support reunification?

For more information please refer to www.drcrumbley.com.

Support the show

Please leave us a rating or review. This podcast is produced by www.CreatingaFamily.org. We are a national non-profit with the mission to strengthen and inspire adoptive, foster & kinship parents and the professionals who support them.

Creating a Family brings you the following trauma-informed, expert-based content:

• Weekly podcasts
• Weekly articles/blog posts
• Resource pages on all aspects of family building

Click here to send us a topic idea or question for Weekend Wisdom.

Question: Can I use my home study for a different type of adoption?

This question arises in the following types of situations. Someone is applying to adopt an infant domestically and gets a home study from a domestic adoption agency. They then decide that they want to adopt from foster care and ask if they can use their domestic home study for foster care adoption. Or, they have applied to adopt internationally and want to know if they can use their international home study for a domestic adoption or an adoption from foster care. Or getting a home study from a foster care agency and wanting to use that for domestic infant or international adoption.

Resources:

• Types of Adoption
• Adoption Agencies
• Adoption Attorneys

Support the show

Please leave us a rating or review. This podcast is produced by www.CreatingaFamily.org. We are a national non-profit with the mission to strengthen and inspire adoptive, foster & kinship parents and the professionals who support them.

Creating a Family brings you the following trauma-informed, expert-based content:

• Weekly podcasts
• Weekly articles/blog posts
• Resource pages on all aspects of family building

Click here to send us a topic idea or question for Weekend Wisdom.

Are you an aunt or uncle raising your nephew or niece? Or are you curious about the unique challenges these families face? Check out today's podcast with a panel of four aunts raising their sibling's child.

In this episode, we cover:

• Who are you raising? How old were they when they moved in? How long have they been with you?
• Didn’t ask for this.
  • Less of a feeling of obligation than grandparents feel.
• Navigating relations with the child’s parents.
  • Frustration with your sibling (the child’s parent)
  • Long-standing resentment of the child’s parents.
  • Navigating boundaries.
• Resentment if it’s your spouse’s niece/nephew.
• Navigating relations between other family members who have an opinion.
• Raising your own kids while raising your nephews and nieces.
  • Jealousies
  • Behaviors rubbing off on kids already in the family
  • Lack of time for the kids who aren’t acting out
• Complications of being single and raising nephews and nieces.
• Putting off having children because of the cost and time commitment to raising nieces and nephews.
• Disagreement between parents on whether or not to take in the children.
• Uncertainty of how long the children will be living with you.
• Joys of raising your nephew or niece

Support the show

Please leave us a rating or review. This podcast is produced by www.CreatingaFamily.org. We are a national non-profit with the mission to strengthen and inspire adoptive, foster & kinship parents and the professionals who support them.

Creating a Family brings you the following trauma-informed, expert-based content:

• Weekly podcasts
• Weekly articles/blog posts
• Resource pages on all aspects of family building